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My mom told me he’d kill me if I didn’t leave him. That was 3 years ago and the last time we spoke. She doesn’t understand. He loves me. I press my fingertips against the black plastic to feel the cold glass of the window. I watch the street below through a small slit. My feet are freezing, tucked up in the moth-eaten blankets of this familiar room. My room. I listen for the lock...

When I quit my antidepressant medication, I was mostly hopeful but a little afraid. Would this be the time my boyfriend gives up on me being a dark-thought disaster queen? Would I spend my days in the black pool of despair that is my depressed mind? Would my anxiety keep me from leaving home or making a phone call? So much uncertainty. I’ve had to take a lot of steps to deal with this medication-free....

We live in a fascinating era. We’re in the age of intangibility, of information, of personal branding. We have apps for everything: finance, social media, productivity, meditation, and travel. We even have apps that are supposed to help us have fewer distractions from other apps. The times they are a changin’. Every generation has a big struggle. The great wars became the struggle of many generations all over the world: they toiled and scraped together what...

In the summer of 1999 I was a 14-year-old goth girl with baggy pants and a weird hairdo when I smoked my first cigarette. My friend Lisa and I would walk to the mall and bum cigarettes from smoking strangers in the food court. We’d collect a mishmash of different brand cigarettes and share them. Back then, I remember little tin ashtrays on every table. Lisa stopped smoking shortly after that. I didn’t. I remember...

If you’ve spent an iota of time on the Internet, you’ve likely seen trigger warnings. Trigger warnings are, as far as I can tell, a social construct used primarily to advise you that something you are about to read, watch, or listen to, contains content that some may find offensive or “triggering”. You may also have seen people lambasted for their failure to use a trigger warning by someone who deemed it necessary. So, what...

I’ve had a Facebook profile for 10 years now. That’s a decade, or almost a third of my lifetime on the largest social media platform. It acts as my lifeline to a pseudo-social life, a documenting of my time (I post incessantly.), and a memory jogger. I give a lot of time to Facebook, but I don’t get much in return as far as meaningful content or personal growth is concerned. It’s how I spend...

When I was 15, my mother bought me a calligraphy pen set for Christmas. It came with the fountain pen, several different nibs, and ink cartridges in black, blue, and red. I followed the instructions to put the ink cartridge in and get it working. We lived below the poverty line so it was by no means a fancy or high quality pen, but at the time I didn’t really understand fountain pens so didn’t...

CHILDHOOD I started writing poetry when I was 9 years old. Nobody ever told me to do it, I simply felt compelled to create a tangible representation of what went on in my young head. As a kid suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), I had a lot of emotions flowing through me: anger and fear being major players. I spent a lot of time alone, and I spent a lot of time writing....

We’re the kids from broken homes. Hide and seek in the park. Freckles and dirty faces. A flashlight in the dark Super Metroid and Battletoads. Clever gopher traps. When time was the street lights. Weather was raindrops in our hands. The sun gave birth to water guns. Neon feet slapping pavement. Before love could hurt anyone. I gave you my heart and you saved it. Whispered secrets and muddy jeans. We...

I’ve had an online presence for nearly 17 years now. It’s kind of strange to think that more than half my life has come with a built in Internet connection; a direct line to virtually the entire planet. When I finish writing this blog post and it gets published, it will instantly become available to anybody who wants to view it, on any device, anywhere in the world. Although only a few hundred people visit...